Peevishness Meter

I'm a very peevish person.  All the time.  It's really kind of weird.  And I get requests from people at times to explain what is making me so irritable.  The trouble is, it's never just one thing, so it's really hard to give any kind of coherent explanation for why I'm more peeved NOW about X minor thing than I was 3 months ago about Y big pain in the ass thing.  Then I realized something amusing: it works EXACTLY like a meter in a video game.

Let me explain.  I seem to have this kind of permanent ongoing Peevishness Level.  Some things add to it, like everyday annoyances, being tired, hungry, people being illogical/stupid/a pain in my ass according to me, doing the dishes for some reason (I always wind up shouting at people who aren't there when I'm doing the dishes, it is Weird), anything uncomfortable or stressful or confusing which involves other people being around me and talking to/at me in any way shape or form, stuff like that.  Some things subtract from it, such as anything I enjoy, getting sleep, people telling me something I did or thought up was ossum (but curiously, not people telling me that I AM ossum, which actually has the opposite effect), ranting, etc.

Every +Peeve incidence to the Peevishness Level has a chance to trigger a Peevishness Outburst varying in scale from Minor (sarcasm) to Not So Minor (profanity) to Medium (Mule-like stubbornness/hiding/crying fit) to  Major (I shall cast my eyes upon you no more, evildoer!) based on a combination of The Severity of the Offense, the Peevishness Level and another measure which I shall call Me Giving A Shit About This.  People about whom a shit is given go way, way down the Outburst scale.  Non-people about which a shit is given tend to go the opposite direction.

The Peevishness Outburst is always short-lived and not associated with a grudge, in fact, it generally acts to lower the overall Peevishness Level.  Even the Major outburst: I'm peevish, not generally vindictive, and the fact that I banish you from my presence doesn't mean I wish you harm--I'm always horrified when some Outburst actually hurts somebody by accident, that is, unless I think you're trying to score points by being an oversensitive twit, in which case, screw you.

The thing is that the Peevishness Level NEVER GOES DOWN ON ITS OWN.  Not ever.  Something has to actually take away some of this peeve for me to stop being irritated.  So I can actually be unusually peevish not because anything particularly bad has happened but because nothing GOOD has happened recently and the Peeve just keeps piling up until I'm Outbursting everywhere like some kind of automatic weapon.  Also attempts to intentionally Relieve the Peeve sometimes backfire.

Every now and then due to some combination of circumstances I get a Peevishness Reset and turn into a Happy Goofball for a while until something happens to raise the Peevishness Level again.

It's annoying as hell for me, but I bet it'd make an interesting video game feature.